Success Quote by Ann Landers

The line gambles on a contrarian thrill: if winning is guaranteed, it stops being a moral act and becomes mere bookkeeping. Ann Landers, the patron saint of mid-century American advice, isn’t romanticizing failure so much as rescuing agency from situations where the outcome is already rigged. “Honor” here isn’t the antique, dueling kind; it’s the everyday dignity of choosing to show up when you don’t get applause, certainty, or a clean win.

The phrasing does its quiet work through two loaded adjectives: “sure success” and “sure defeat.” Landers isn’t debating whether success is good. She’s puncturing the special modern delusion that the best life is the most optimized one, the one with the least risk. If the result is “sure,” the self is unnecessary. You can’t prove character in a world that doesn’t test it.

Then comes the best verb in the sentence: “wrested.” Not “learned” or “gained,” but yanked out of defeat like something stubborn and physical. The subtext is that failure isn’t automatically noble; it’s raw material. Defeat becomes a place where you can extract meaning, solidarity, self-respect, maybe even leverage - but only through effort.

Context matters: Landers wrote to people boxed in by family roles, social expectations, illness, divorce, addiction, grief. Many of her readers couldn’t “win” in the conventional sense. This quote offers a tactical consolation: you may not control the scoreboard, but you can still control the stance you take, and that stance can be the most honest kind of triumph.